Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here).
The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc Adreesen, and the reaction thereto by left-wing journalists, who have called it “conservative”, and even “reactionary”.
Lyons (I’m still not sure if the author is a Mr. or a Ms., so it will just have to be “Lyons” for now) makes some important and clarifying distinctions that will be familiar to NRx types, but perhaps not to the wider public. But even if what Lyons writes is nothing new to you, it’s always good to see things like this in print, in the interest of promoting a better general understanding of some common terms that people throw about quite carelessly and confusingly.
In 2013 my friend “Spandrell”, one of the brightest of the group of neoreactionary writers that sprang up in the first decade of the new century, proposed that the welter of emerging neoreactionary thought could be parsed into an intellectual “trichotomy”, with a religious/traditional branch, an ethnic/nationalist branch, and a technological/capitalist branch. (Nick Land called them “Christian, Caucasian, and Capitalist”).
What was it that glued these distinctively different worldviews together as “neoreaction”? Mostly it was a general agreement that modernity had gone off the rails: that some sort of debilitating, enervating sickness had come over Western culture that had sapped it of its virility, vitality, and its foundation of purpose and meaning. In general, all three branches of NRx saw the flattening, entropic corrosion of Leftism at the heart of the problem, in particular its sullen and smothering opposition to hierarchy, discrimination, merit, and individual excellence — natural human virtues that can only be subdued by totalizing state power and the ruthless tamping down of organic inequalities. (See this article of my own for a more detailed description of this implacable Enemy.)
Beyond that broad agreement, though, there was always an intellectual tension within the trichotomy — not so much between the religious/traditional and ethnic/national types, which had a good deal of overlap, but between those two, where my own sympathies lie, and the technofuturists. I summed up this concern in a post I wrote ten years ago:
[One] organic outgrowth of human nature, [a] feature of our extended phenotype, is relentless technological advancement, which can be as disruptive as any social engineering. Even simple ideas, like the stirrup, can have world-changing consequences — and the pace of technological change is now accelerating exponentially. The coming decades of technological innovation hold the genuine promise of revolutionary liberation — from disease, from hunger, from poverty, from toil, and even from the confines of Earth, and of our own bodies — but will also make possible terrifying new forms of tyranny, wielding powers whose breadth knows no Earthly limit, and whose depth extends into our very cells. Even the most oppressive despot of a century ago could do little to affect the day-to-day, and moment-to-moment, lives of his far-flung subjects; in recent years we have made possible, and blithely accepted, a level of surveillance and control that has never existed before in the history of the world.
While I was at Singularity University last year, I heard someone say “If you can see the road ahead, you aren’t going fast enough.” The speaker made his remark, to a room full of like-minded Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, in a spirit of can-do enthusiasm, but it made my blood run cold.
The gist of N.S. Lyons’ article is to pry apart, once again, the technocapitalist branch of Spandrell’s Trichotomy from the other two, and to make the point that, although technofuturists can fairly said to be of the “Right”, in virtue of the views they share with the rest of the NRx troika, it is an error and a confusion to call them in any sense “conservative”, as there seems to be nothing at all that they seek to conserve. Indeed, argues Lyons, they are really better seen as “Right-Wing Progressives”: Progressives who, like the “OG” Progressives of the early 20th century, reject the egalitarian premises of Leftism. (Recall, for example, that every pre-war Progressive intellectual, before the movement was infiltrated by Leftism, eagerly embraced eugenics.) To remind us again, in this new and different era, that Progressive/Conservative and Left/Right define two orthogonal axes is an important clarification.
In another ten-year-old post here at the blog, I blurred this subtle distinction by contrasting “conservatives” with “those on the Left”:
To the conservative, traditions arise naturally from the workings of human nature, as part of the ontogeny and organic development of societies. They are not the result of scientific planning or sociological theorizing — and like biological species themselves, they only come into view in retrospect. They are, in a sense, part of the “extended phenotype” of our species and its various subgroups, as languages are; and just as languages do, they naturally adapt to, and come to represent, those things that actually matter to the various human groups from which they arise. (Many have been, at least up till now, more or less universal.) In this way they contain a great deal of deeply-buried knowledge about the optimal functioning of the human social organism, often for reasons, and in ways, that themselves need not be explicitly represented in the organism’s consciousness. Because of this, disrupting them will always have unknowable consequences — and so, at least, tradition justifies respect for its embodied wisdom, and caution as regards casual tampering.
To those on the Left, traditions are artifacts. Rather than being organic outgrowths and aspects of human nature itself, they are human creations; they are social technology, whose only purpose is to control and manipulate human behavior. In this view, human “nature” hardly exists at all, and traditions are wholly external things; indeed almost everything about human behavior and human life is external to the individual. This means that to mold human beings, or human societies, into any desirable configuration is simply a matter of discarding traditions, and inventing new ones, until we obtain the correct result. Because of this, tradition justifies very little indeed.
Lyons’ point is that there are also Progressives on the Right who see everything about human life as a merely technological challenge, an engineering problem; indeed, unlike the Left we’ve been used to, they even see the transformation of human beings themselves as amenable to technological, rather than merely social, engineering.
One thing that is glaringly missing in the technofuturist worldview, despite all its fondness for hierarchy, is the extension of that hierarchy to the metaphysically transcendent. They see humanity’s telos in purely material (or at best intellectual), rather than spiritual, terms. Because of this dogged materialism, their soteriology, unlike that of the religious/traditionalist branch of the Trichotomy, consists not transcending the material world, but of devising increasingly sophisticated ways to control it: not of union with God in Heaven, but becoming gods themselves, here below. The theonomist seeks to ascend, but the technofuturist yearns only to expand.
The problem with this view, as seen from my corner of neoreaction, is that, as Lyons points out in this essay, technological advancement tends not to strengthen our bodies and souls, but to weaken them. Lyons writes:
Finally, [Andreesen’s] manifesto isn’t even really coherent with the Nietzschean-inflected vitalism that it tries to celebrate. Though Nietzsche was far more of a revolutionary than he was a reactionary, and is therefore much more suitable to a futurist mindset, there is a big problem here: how does Andreessen think once-vital man became Nietzsche’s weak and listless Last Man in the first place? How did he lose his greatness, excellence, agency, and vitality – his striving “aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength”? As Curtis Yarvin has also noted, the obvious answer is that this thumotic spirit was gradually eradicated by the ease and dependency created by his own technological machines. Strength and hardiness are produced by hardship and deprivation, not comfort and plenty. If Andreessen believes the infinite abundance and fully-automated luxury of his imagined technological future would ever produce anything more than those obese blob-humans of WALL-E (bound to their anti-gravity chairs and fully dependent on robots to fulfill their every decadent need, including to make all their decisions) then he is gravely mistaken. A truly vital humanism would contemptuously reject the sweet siren call of the machine for the bodily and spiritual struggle of a voluntary barbarism. The techno-optimist habitually proposes the opposite.
Just so. And I would add that the softening is not merely physical: as we offload more and more of our thinking, and our knowing, to our machines, those faculties will atrophy as well. Already our younger cohort seem to have forgotten how to do arithmetic; for my own part, I’ve noticed that when I rely on GPS navigation to drive someplace I arrive without any real sense of where I am, or how I got there — and I think that is a frighteningly apt metaphor for what lies ahead.
Read this excellent essay here.